23.12.09

Village Voice - Year-End Film Poll — 2009 (Resumen de resultados)

Best Films of 2009

1. The Hurt LockerKathryn Bigelow(356 points, 54 mentions)Bigelow's you-are-there Iraq War drama immerses the viewer in the front-line existence of a U.S. bomb squad in Baghdad. It's an experiential war movie—and a full-throttle body-shock, too.

2. Summer HoursOlivier Assayas(239 points, 40 mentions)Old money meets a new world as bourgeois siblings struggle to divide their mother's estate and Assayas ponders the value of family and France in the age of relentless globalization.

3. A Serious ManJoel and Ethan Coen(229 points, 34 mentions)Larry Gopnik, schlub extraordinaire, absorbs humiliations of all kind—financial, professional, personal, rabbinical—to learn that life is really about . . . just kidding! Life isn't about anything, God sucks, and the Coens are brutal in this blackest of black comedies.

4. Inglourious BasterdsQuentin Tarantino(214 points, 36 mentions)All hail Quentin Tarantino's smashingly entertaining World War II romp about a dirty half-dozen American grunts trying to bring an end to the Third Reich. Jews and Nazis may battle it out to a fiery finish, but it is cinema that emerges triumphant.

10. UpPete Docter and Bob Peterson(120 points, 21 mentions)The latest Pixar insta-classic, Up takes off as widower Carl turns his home into a high-flying house-balloon and floats up, up, and away to see the world. Turns out, he is not alone—and his journey for personal wish fulfillment becomes something even more essential.

BEST ACTOR

Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker(60 points, 27 mentions)Beneath his blustery macho surface, Renner's Staff Sergeant William James may be the movie's most intricately wired explosive device. Bomb-detonator wins the war for best actor, at least.

Christoph Waltz, Inglourious Basterds(92 points, 35 mentions)As the loquacious Nazi Hans Landa, Waltz is not only the movie's villain, but also its master of revels. A cheerfully sadistic SS Colonel you can root for!

Anvil! The Story of Anvil(12 points)Sacha Gervasi's phenomenal rockumentary follows the now-fiftysomething "demigods of Canadian metal" through a disastrous European tour and the recording of their 13th album—and waning shot at fame.

Runners-up:

Of Time and the City (10 points)The Beaches of Agnès (9 points)The Cove (8 points)La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet;Tyson (7 points)

BEST FIRST FEATURE

The Messenger(8 points)The directorial debut of Oren Moverman (who wrote Todd Haynes's I'm Not There) is a moving and nuanced drama about a pair of casualty notification officers, bearing awful news while coping with their own traumas.

Runners-up:

Afterschool (7 points)In the Loop; A Single Man; Tulpan (6 points)

BEST UNDISTRIBUTED FILM

To Die Like a Man(24 points, 11 mentions)

A fabulously sad fable about a Fado-singing, pooch-pampering trannie growing old, Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues's To Die Like a Man, which premiered at this past Cannes and then came stateside to the New York Film Festival, is also a piece of lyrical, playful, unpredictable filmmaking.

BEST FILM OF THE DECADEMulholland Drive (10 points)Comic, sexy, surreal, self-reflexive, thrilling, and ludicrous by turns, David Lynch's 2001 exploration of the Hollywood dream factory is a voluptuous phantasmagoria with a two-part structure that suggests Buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. reversed so that the dream comes first.